Citizens: Backwardness and Legitimacy in Agronomy and Economics, 1900–14

Abstract

In the disillusionment that followed the Revolution of 1905–7, a new generation of professional agronomists and economists rejected the neat dichotomies of liberty and oppression, freedom and coercion, democracy and dictatorship, and left and right, and turned to the certainty of ‘objective science’.¹ In this they joined a host of professional and public activists who disavowed the partisan movements that had unleashed a violent peasant bunt that lacked, in the corporeal language of the literature, ‘a brain’. Agronomists employed a different set of binary oppositions structured by notions of linear time and bracketed by backwardness and progress, darkness and light, body and mind, masses and intelligentsiia, and spontaneity and consciousness.² Professionals placed themselves firmly at the one end and peasants at the other, and presumed that peasants — victimized by their own ignorance as much as the oppression of the socio-economic system — were unable to articulate their interests or profoundly misunderstood them.